HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We have approximately 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. Those Hyper-V machines are being used and converted to VMware. We use Zerto for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. We are also considering using it for DR purposes. 

Our prod environment runs on-premises and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. Our development runs on machines and hardware. In the event of a DR event, we would shut down dev and bring up our secondary copy of production. We hope that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.

Zerto offered us massive time saving and consistency. We have a consistent outcome every time we complete conversions. We move from one platform to another with different loads being moved each time and Zerto's results are consistent each time.

We convert 30 to 50 VMs from Hyper-V to VMware on a nightly basis which has resulted in saving time as this is good throughput. Zerto also helped to reduce downtime. If we were to do this manually, we would have a lot of downtime to shut down those VMs on Hyper-V to be able to do the conversions.

The ease of the conversion moving from Hyper-V over to VMware is the primary reason why we chose Zerto and is its most valuable feature.

There has been one pain point that we have run into. We wanted to shut down the dev environment to focus on the prod environment. We couldn't find any option in Zerto to do that.

We have been using this solution since the start of 2022. 

This is a stable solution that offers consistent results. 

From a DR perspective, we use a few solutions. We have multi-site data centers in our environment along with Cohesity. We use Cohesity from a backup and DR perspective.

If you're in the middle of conversion between different platforms, regardless of if you're moving from on-premises to host it or from one environment to another, Zerto is agile and able to move your workloads into different environments pretty easily.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case is to migrate VMs. It's easier to use than HCX and SRM.

Zerto made our migration from different data centers very easy and very smooth. Zerto support and our account manager have always been there to help us out.

I found the very easy VPG setup, the easy recovery, and failover testing to be the most valuable features.

It's very user-friendly. You only need a couple of clicks, and it gets the job done. We also have SRM, but Zerto just requires a couple of clicks. You can test with Zerto, and you don't have to commit. So in terms of ease of use, Zerto is better. That's why we use it for migration.

In terms of reducing downtime, we don't actually have any because of seeding and mirroring. However, on the failover, it only takes two seconds of a blip.

Zerto's speed of recovery compared to that of others is great. It's incomparable, and the ease of use is always there.

Even though Zerto is for disaster recovery, it would be nice if it can also make backups.

I've been working with Zerto for three to four years.

It's very stable. They have bug fixes. If there's a problem, you can report it, and they immediately provide a solution.

Zerto's scalability is amazing. If they could do backups in the future, it would be better.

We're in a healthcare environment, so we have probably 30,000 VMs. We only have a couple of licenses, but that's probably going to grow in the near future. We're going to be using it in the cloud as well.

I would give technical support a nine out of ten. I'm taking away a point because, at times, they send emails for me to read when I need something done immediately.

Positive

We previously used SRM. We use Zerto because it is just easy to use. You don't need to set up a lot of stuff. You only need to set up one appliance on each site, and you're good to go.

The initial deployment is very straightforward. You just install the appliance, make sure that all the ports are working fine, test the connection, and you're done. If you have any problems, technical support is always there to help.

We had help from CDI for the initial deployment, and they were not bad. It was easy enough, but we had to use our credits. If it were not for the credits, we could have done it ourselves.

After the initial deployment, my team has been doing all the upgrades and any other setups.

We're down to a couple of data centers now, and our data center cost is going down. That is the ROI we have seen with Zerto.

The pricing is fair.

We evaluated SRM.

You don't have to evaluate Zerto; it just works. I would give it a ten out of ten;
I have no complaints.

Our primary use cases were designed around backing up and being able to restore our management plan. This isn't something used for our department users. It is specifically for our infrastructure, things like vCenter, vRealize Operations—all those things that we still have to maintain. We wanted something a little more granular than just a standard backup. We needed to be able to say, "Rollback half an hour or an hour," as opposed to following the backup schedule that the larger backup system provided.

We're using it for migration. Zerto plays a large role in helping us move away from Hyper-V into VMware. We're talking about multiple departments that had to transition their applications and Zerto gave us an opportunity to do it in a much less painful way.

Another key benefit is that our response time has significantly decreased. We're no longer having to rely on the traditional process where you manually execute a backup and hope to God it works okay. And then, you have to run through whatever changes are necessary and cross your fingers that, if you have to restore, it will come back. We don't have that problem with Zerto.

The solution has also helped to reduce downtime for us, absolutely. In most cases, we are able to use Zerto as a momentary backup, run an upgrade or installation, and see whether or not we're going to succeed. We can potentially back it out without anybody knowing about it because it's still within our maintenance window. We never exceed that rather limited time period. That's very helpful. With our existing backup, more likely than not we're rolling into days at a time if something fails. So if our maintenance window was on the weekend, it would roll into the production week and cut into the week by a few days. That would be very problematic.

And the recovery speed is basically as fast as the speed of our pipe, and that's what makes it great. As long as our pipes are fast, we don't have to worry. We can roll in, roll out, or potentially roll back if we have to, within a really small window of time.

In addition, it has definitely reduced the number of operational groups involved in backups. Zerto is not managed by our storage team. It is managed by the team I'm on, which is infrastructure. Because of that, it's all internal to us on the infrastructure team. We don't have to go outside of our team to coordinate with others.

There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable.

There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly. But it really depends on the audience. If we are using it as a technical tool, our team is the audience and we are able to utilize it. But if we were to pass this on to, let's say, the department users, that would become a little problematic. I'm wondering whether or not we can actually expand our offering to those department users. That may be a question.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

As long as our infrastructure is stable, it's stable.

All I have to do is add managers out there and it expands. What it boils down to is that my infrastructure has to be able to support it. I have to have space where I can send the backups to. As long as that exists, we're fine.

The customer support is pretty good. The bottom line is that the customer service is responsive, whether we're talking about technical challenges or even licensing challenges. They've been very helpful in both ways.

Positive

We played a little bit with Veeam, but for the most part, we relied on our storage team to provide us with backups. We switched to Zerto because that team wasn't able to deliver in a timely fashion and they weren't able to guarantee restorability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We have an individual who is our infrastructure expert. He took it upon himself to try it out. He told us what he found out when he did that trial and we started playing with it a little bit more and saw how easy it was to use.

I don't want to create upward pressure on their pricing plan, but the pricing is good. It's affordable.

The amount we had to set aside for our existing backup solution, compared to Zerto, was astronomical. The way Zerto works, it is so easy to scale up and out. It's not going to end up creating undue pushback as far as the cost goes.

We evaluated other solutions, with Veeam being one of them.

There's a lot about Veeam that we only just touched the tip of. I can't say with a lot of certainty what specific features Veeam may have. But there's a reason that we only touched the tip of Veeam and jumped over to Zerto.

One of the things that brought us to Zerto was talking to some of the folks that were here, at VMware Explore, years back, about what Zerto did, how it did it, and where it got its origins. That told us it was something that was definitely pretty solid and worth trying. I have to admit that, after trying it, it hasn't disappointed.

Leaving Veeam aside and comparing Zerto with our existing backup functionality, forget it. The two solutions are night and day. There is no comparison whatsoever. There is a lot of overhead with our existing backup feature that we just don't have with Zerto. We definitely have an easier time managing and controlling it. Zerto is definitely easier to use than our existing backup function.

One of the things that I'm finding with Zerto is that we're discovering new uses every day. As we continue to explore what Zerto can do, we haven't even gotten to the point where we say, "We wish it could do X." I'm not quite sure how Zerto interacts with cloud as a target, right now. That's something I need to learn. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto, it's just me not knowing it yet.

We have a production environment that we are replicating to a warm data center, and Zerto keeps our virtual machine-protected groups in continuous sync. It has been working really well for us.

It's given us a sense of trust that if we have to fail over in a DR situation, it's going to be kind of like Apple, it just works. It gives us peace of mind.

We use it to help protect VMs and its effect on our RPOs is that it is exceeding what we set out to achieve. And the RTO is exactly what we're looking for.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. It's at least 300 percent faster than our previous solution.

I would give it an eight out of 10, if not a nine out of 10, when it comes to ease of use.

It's hard to say where it could be improved. The few times I've had issues with the interface, which is, for the most part, intuitive, we have been able to take care of most issues without having to open a case.

There are a couple of areas in the interface that are not very intuitive. Most of them are pretty easy, but there are a few areas in the journal and replication that, unless you've done it before, you really have no idea what to do. When I get to those points I'll reach out and ask for a little assistance or do a Google search to find the solution to the problem that we're having. 

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the solution.

We haven't had to scale it up yet from the initial licensing that we got, but it seems pretty straightforward that, if we grow, it can grow right along with us, and it's pretty easy.

We have not done anything other than replicate to a warm data center for DR purposes. We have not looked into taking it to the cloud, but that may be something we'll do in the future.

Their technical support is pretty good. The few times I've had to open a case, the response has been a little bit slow in the sense that it's almost like they want me to prove my need for a case; more than I think should be necessary.

If I'm looking for help, I need help, and their first response is to tell me to run logs and to put them up, and "Are you sure you covered this and that?" I have to tell them, "I'm already past that point and I'm ready to speak to somebody."

That would be the only thing that could use some improvement, having quicker access to somebody I can speak to, or at least email with, without having to jump through a lot of hoops first.

Neutral

We used VMware's SRM, which is their site-to-site replication solution. We made the switch because we needed something that actually worked. VMware SRM was very complex, very clunky, and it was constantly falling behind our RPO. Zerto is lean and mean and gets the job done, and I don't have to babysit it.

Also, the ease of use is much better than anything we have used before.

I was amazed at the ease of the installation and how quickly it went. I actually did the install with the support engineer looking over my shoulder, and it was done in 30 minutes.

We went through a reseller to purchase the product, but it was the Zerto engineer and I who did the actual install.

We were pretty happy with the pricing. When we switched to Zerto, we were a little on the small side of things. Zerto was looking at more of a larger-environment customer base. We're in at the bottom tier of supported servers, but they gave us a very good price. It was really a no-brainer for us to be able to have such a good product for our size environment. They came down and met us in the middle and gave us an enterprise-quality product for our mid- to small-size business needs.

It's been a while since we have looked around. We came from VMware, and there were at least two others. Cisco had a product, and IBM had a product, and they were way overpriced.

It has been very consistent in keeping up with our RPO and RTO and we have been very happy with it.

Zerto hasn't replaced our other backup solutions, just so that we have redundancy. We don't own the license for long-term retention with Zerto, so we have an offsite backup in addition to the production environment replication.

Give it a shot. It's quick, it's easy, and reliable, and you can run an evaluation pretty inexpensively. You just need another location that you can replicate to for that.

Zerto is deployed on a VM, and we use it to replicate the database for our POS system in our data center.

Zerto helps us when our server has an emergency. When we needed to get something from a server that had a corrupt file, it saved us from needing to go back to a tape or a backup to use that server. The recovery works better than our backup. I would rate that nine out of a 10.

It works great because we only use it in VMware for our virtual machines. We use Zerto Instead of snapshots. Zerto is a lot quicker than other solutions. It cuts our downtime in half when we need to recover data.

Data replication is the most valuable feature. The near-synchronous replication works in the background, so it does not interfere with the production usage of the server. Zerto is challenging to set up but easy to use. It's not difficult to configure once you see how it works. I'd give it at least eight out of 10 for ease of use.

I've been using Zerto for about a year.

Zerto is highly scalable. Even though we only have it on a couple of servers, we could do all of them if we want to.

Customer support is great. I'd say it is at least a nine. When I have a technical question, it sometimes takes a while for tech support to respond. That's a problem everywhere.

Positive

I've used backup solutions like Veeam in the past, but Zerto seemed like a better, faster solution. We adopted Zerto because of the speed, and because we wanted to do everything in-house. I would rate Zerto eight out of ten for ease of use, but Veeam seven out of 10. 

Setting up Zerto is straightforward, but I needed to call tech support a few times with some basic questions. I handled the setup by myself because I'm in charge of servers and VMware. It doesn't require much maintenance aside from updates. 

It reduces the time and effort needed to get our data. 

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten. When I first installed it, I learned a lot about how it worked and how to integrate it with my storage. I needed to configure our storage to work with this because we do everything in-house. It's crucial to understand how everything works together.

You need to read the installation instructions thoroughly and prepare your VMware environment. I jumped right into it and didn't go through everything. Read everything and watch some videos first to prepare. If I do it again, I will watch the videos a few times to make sure I understand what's required and go from there.

We're replicating mainly some of our critical applications. One is our backup solution and then also some critical applications that we don't want to have to recover from tapes. That's been working very well for us. We actually just recently went through a DR rehearsal, where we ran a quick test and that ran for about a week and then completed that test. Then we were able to report that we were able to successfully recover our critical ERP system inside of the remote location successfully.

I don't have to worry about Zerto so much. It definitely continues working. We definitely have monitoring and everything like this to make sure things are working just fine, but I can't complain about it in any kind of way. I know we are a little behind on the version that we're using and we need to be on the latest and greatest. Right now we're on version 7.0.

It reduced the backup recovery time of our main backup solution by several hours. It's reduced our time because before we have to build a system and restore the data, we install the application and restore the data that took us at least a good 24 hours to do that. And now it's really minutes for us to recover our backup solution.

Zerto reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery or in a data recovery situation. It's now only one person while it was four previously. 

Comparing it to VMware SRM, Zerto is by far the best that I've used before for providing continuous data protection. 

Different parts of the company use VMware, we use Zerto, and then we saw where they were taking us. Ours really takes less than an hour just to do a quick failover. So it didn't make any sense to go with VMware one, so we ended up going with Zerto.

An employee had actually introduced us to it and we looked at it and wanted to try it. He was working for a bank that does quite a bit as far as doing disaster recovery. So if a bank used it then I would definitely use it. 

It is fairly easy. It's not as technical to get around it or anything like that.

It's a fairly easy tool to use. 

I know that Zerto can definitely improve some functionalities. I know some of the cloud pieces probably enable that. At the moment, it's doing what we want for us, and what it's doing for us right now is plenty. I can't say there's any improvement that I can see that needs to be done at the moment.

I'm not sure if it has throttling, meaning, what's going over the wire and how we can throttle that to reduce the amount of data that's going across the bandwidth. I can't remember if that's something that's in this product. It might be in the more recent version. 

I have been using Zerto for three to four years. 

Their support has been very good. I can't complain about them. 

The initial deployment was straightforward for the admin that deployed it. It was not complicated. That person left and then another person came in who didn't know anything about this product and he picked it up fairly easily and he's able to manage it with ease.

He's a VMware administrator and he also maintains Zerto.

The deployment was done within a day.  

We don't have plans to increase usage because we are at the point where we're closing out. We're migrating some of our data centers and right now I know it's going to continue utilizing what we have. We haven't even hit the capacity of what we've got right now. Because I think the license we have is around 75 servers. We haven't even hit that. The only thing that's stopping us from right now is just that we need to increase the storage at the remote location to handle additional workloads. We have around 14 servers. 

We have seen ROI from Zerto. 

It has reduced downtime. It went from 24 hours to four minutes. It could even be seconds. It's fairly quick.

The dollar amount would equate to something in the millions. For an environment to be restored it means restoring our ERP systems. Then in that ERP in that system, it also has some manufacturing as well.

Pricing is fair. I don't see a big issue with the pricing for what we are trying to do. The things that we're replicating, if it were to go down it pays for it in itself there.

We don't have any plans for long-term retention. They talked to us about it. But at the moment it's not in our forecast to look at that.

We don't have to failback because we just fail to a bubble, in other words. We don't want to bring down production because we're going through migration of our ERP. So we fail it over into this bubble. And that's what we're using. It is the test failover that we're using in that environment. Then in that environment, everything is isolated. That's how we use it today. We have never had to failback back to our main site.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

It is for real-time data protection and, if needed, for the ability to recover within seconds at a point in time. It is deployed on-premise and multi-cloud on Azure and AWS.

It just gives us extra peace of mind. We can backup and recover critical information not only on-premise but also off-premise at multiple places. So, we have that additional place for recovery if Azure or AWS is having problems.

When we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time and the number of people involved. It definitely speeds up the process of recovery for us. We essentially need only one person for the recovery process. In other solutions that we had in the past, we had to involve quite a few of our team members in the recovery process. We haven't had to do fail back a lot, so I can't give a real numeric number of how much it has saved us. If we had to do a big fail back, I can see where it could have saved us.

It has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. The number of staff involved is less than what it used to be. We can basically do that with one person. It also reduces the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management.

It has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We don't have to buy another SAN, so it has saved somewhere in the $150,000 to $200,000 range.

The reliability of the solution and ease of upgrades are most valuable. Support has also been really good on it.

It works very well in terms of it providing continuous data protection. It does what it says it is going to do. We have been using it for several years, and once or twice, we had to recover a machine or files. It didn't have any problems in doing what it is supposed to be doing.

It is easy to use once you have gone through the online training class to learn the basics about it. We have been able to get a couple of our folks in the IT department up to speed on how it works and how to utilize it within basically a day or less. It is relatively easy for us to get staff trained and get going.

We would like some of the real fine or granular things. We've submitted a few minor things for enhancements such as being able to control bandwidth utilization for each facility you replicate to versus overall. We just need a little bit more granularity on some of the things, but there is not a whole bunch that is in need of tweaking.

We've been using this solution for three years.

It has been very stable for us. We haven't had any issues with it. Even upgrades have been relatively seamless for us. If anything, it is just that you miss something on the upgrade release note and you need to open a port or something else, but there is nothing critical.

It seems to be very scalable. We're not that big, but it seems to scale out for us and give us more scale for what we are size-wise. It could be very beneficial for a bigger organization.

We started out protecting roughly 30 terabytes of data, and that's roughly where we're right now. We have 30 terabytes of data and 250 employees. We are just trying to keep them all functioning 24/7.

At the moment, we don't have any plans to increase the usage. We're utilizing everything we can at the moment. The only thing that we might consider down the road is the backup functionality long-term, but that's something we just keep evaluating versus what we currently have. What we currently have works so well, and we don't really want to change it.

Their support has been really good. They've been very proactive in helping resolve issues, and you get quick callbacks or contact with them. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

They used Avamar Data Domain before Zerto. It had a very complicated process, and the price was also very high. It did not have a similar granularity of recovery points.

It was pretty straightforward. We had it fully installed and started implementing it within the first couple of hours of the process. We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two, and by then, we had the process down. After that, it was pretty straightforward, and we just replicated that for additional protection groups.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we knew what we needed. We wanted to get out in the cloud. We focused on Azure to start with and then came back and looked at AWS after the fact for a couple of use cases where Azure wasn't the best place for some big data sets.

For its day-to-day maintenance or administration, there is just me. We do have desktop admins that can get into it as well if they need to be, but generally, I take care of it all for them. They just holler out if they have a problem or a question about something, and I can take care of it for them.

We worked with the local rep for about an hour or two. Our experience with him was very good. He was very helpful and knowledgeable about the product and also about the ways other folks were using the product.

There is nothing that we can quantitatively define, but we are able to meet regulatory requirements.

It initially seemed a little pricey, but in the big picture, you're paying for peace of mind. It could always be cheaper and more competitive, which would make it an easier choice for people, but I can see both ways. They can say this cost is for the value they are providing. If anything happens, they can recover your data very quickly. You won't be losing it, so there is a win. It is a win-win.

We evaluated VMware Site Recovery Manager. I have used that in the past, and it is okay, but upgrades tend to break a lot of stuff, whereas Zerto hasn't had that kind of issue, which is great. It is never a good thing to do a minor update and then your whole system is dead for maybe a day or two until you figure out what caused the breakage. We also looked at SRM and Cohesity. Cohesity was more for just overall backup, not for full DR.

Zerto was very easy to use. We could use it for backup and DR, which was very important for us. That was one of the key driving factors for us.

I would advise others to just get the training before utilizing it so that you have a better understanding of the overall product. You should also have plenty of bandwidth for your providers so that replication works seamlessly.

It has helped us a little bit in reducing downtime in a couple of cases. It saved us a few hours here and there. It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes. We haven't had to use it currently for that. Its overall backup and DR management could also reduce the number of people needed.

We don't use Zerto for long-term retention. We have another solution in place for that. We will evaluate Zerto possibly down the road.

I would rate Zerto a 10 out of 10.

We use Zerto for real-time replication of our systems, company-wide. The main reason is disaster recovery failover.

We use the long-term retention functionality, although it is not deployed system-wide. We have a lot of critical systems backed up, such as our file servers. We utilize it to hold things for up to a year and we send our long-term retention to ExaGrid appliances.

When we need to failback or move workloads, this solution has decreased the time it takes and the number of people involved. The entire process is, realistically, a one-person job. We usually have an application specialist involved just to validate the health of the server. Whether it's an SQL server or application server, we have somebody that runs integrity checks on it. That said, the entire process is very painless and easily handled by one person.

I estimate that this product saves us hours in comparison to products like Veeam. Veeam would take several hours of time to fail something over. 

Our company fell victim to a ransomware attack that affected between 50 and 60 servers. Until we knew for sure that the entire situation was remediated and that we weren't going to spread the infection, we restored the servers in an offline manner, which only took a matter of minutes to complete. Then, we pushed all of that data into Teams and OneDrive directly for people to start accessing it.

From the SQL server perspective, we failed those servers over, running health checks such as anti-virus scans, just to make sure that the failed over instance didn't contain the same situations. Thankfully, they did not. We probably saved ourselves several days worth of work in the grand scheme of things. In total, it potentially would have taken weeks to resolve using a different solution.

I wouldn't necessarily say that using Zerto has meant that we can reduce the number of staff in a recovery operation. However, I think it's probably mitigated the need to hire more people. Essentially, as we've continued to grow, we've avoided adding headcount to our team. Using Veeam as my problem child to compare against, if we were using it, it would have required a lot more management from us. It would have cost us more time to recover and manage those jobs, including the management of the ExaGrid appliances, as well as the VRAs, which are basically proxies.

Definitely, there is a huge saving in time using Zerto and although we didn't reduce any headcount or repurpose anything, we've definitely mitigated at least two people from the hiring perspective.

Zerto saved us considerable downtime when we experienced the ransomware attack. It may be hard to substantiate that just on the one situation but we saved at least a couple of million dollars.

The most valuable feature is the continuous recovery with the five-second checkpoint interval. Just having those checkpoints prior to when a situation arises, we're able to get the transactional data that occurred right before the server failed. That has been a blessing for us, as we are able to provide a snapshot with no more than five seconds of data loss. This means that we don't have to recreate minutes or hours worth of data for an industry that includes fulfillment, shipping, warehousing, et cetera.

Zerto is very good at providing continuous data protection. It does a very good job keeping up with the system and it creates five-second interval checkpoints. This has been helpful when it comes to needing to fail something over, getting that last moment in time that was in a usable state.

This product is impressively easy to use. It's dummy-proof, once it's set up.

The long-term recovery is a little bit weak in its granularity. Veeam is definitely superior in that aspect, as it's able to provide a granular view of files and databases, et cetera. However, it just kind of depends on what a business' recovery strategy is.

From our business perspective, it's really not impactful to us because our recovery strategy is not based on individual files. But, I could definitely see it being a challenge if there is a very large instance of individual files, as a subset, that need to be recovered. I think that if somebody has terabytes of data then Zerto will recover it faster but navigating through the file explorer to get to files is not as easy with Zerto.

One thing I don't like about the product, and I know this is where their claim to fame is, but whenever I have a VPG that has multiple virtual machines in it, and one virtual machine falls behind, it'll pause replication on everything else in that job until the one server catches up. The goal is to keep symmetric replication processing going, so the strategy makes sense, but for our business model, that doesn't really work and it has created a challenge where I have to manage each VM individually. It means that instead of having one job that would cover multiple servers, I just have one job to one server, which allows me to manage them individually.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

From a company perspective, a few years ago, I would have said that it is very stable. It is a solution that is thriving and growing. At this time, however, HP is in the process of acquiring them. While I had assumed that was their long-term plan, I didn't quite anticipate HP being the one to pick them up. As such, I am a little bit worried about what will change in the long term.

Scalability-wise, it's a very painless product. As we continue to grow out our virtual environment, Zerto is able to, in a very nimble fashion, scale with us with very little effort or overhead involved.

I'm covering approximately 400 VMs currently, which is approximately 360 terabytes worth of data. That is between two separate data centers.

Rating the Zerto technical support is a little bit tough because I've had some experiences that were truly 10 of 10, but then I've had one or two experiences where it was definitely a two or a three out of 10. It really depends on who I've gotten on the phone and their level of, A, comfort with their own system, and B, comfort helping the customer.

Some people have said this isn't within their scope of work, where others have said, "No, let's absolutely do this." In that regard, it's been a little hit and miss, but it's usually been a decent quality in the end.

Overall, I would rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

I have worked with Veeam in the past and although I prefer Zerto, there are some advantages to using Veeam. For example, long-term recovery offers more features.

In-house, we had also used the Unitrends product, as well as a SAN-to-SAN replication using an old HPE LeftHand array.

The main reasons that we switched to Zerto were the management ability, as well as its ability to provide continuous replication. Veeam was a very cumbersome product to manage. There were a lot of instances to monitor and manage from a proxy perspective, whereas Zerto's VRAs are relatively transparent in their configuration and deployment. These are painless and I don't have to continually monitor them. I don't have to update them since they're not like standalone Windows instances. It's very low management for us.

Of course, continuous replication is critical because Veeam, even though when we had owned the product, it claimed 15-minute intervals were doable, it never seemed to actually keep up with those 15-minute snapshot intervals.

One final reason that we migrated from Veeam is that they were utilizing VM snapshots at the time. I know that they've moved away from that approach now, but it was very painful for our environment at the time. The VMware snapshots were causing some of our legacy and proprietary applications to fail.

The initial setup is very simple.

Our implementation strategy involved setting it up for our two data centers. We have a primary and secondary data center, and Zerto keeps track of all of the VMs at the primary site and replicates them to the other site.

In the future, we plan on looking into the on-premises to cloud replication. On-premises to Azure direct is on our roadmap.

I completed the setup myself without support or anybody else involved in the deployment.

It took approximately an hour to deploy.

I handle all of the administration and maintenance. As the senior manager of infrastructure, I oversee our work and server group. I have also retained private ownership over the disaster recovery plan and failover plan.

We have probably not seen a return on investment from using Zerto. We don't really have lots of situations where we have to use it and can substantiate any kind of financial claim to it.

I do not like the current pricing model because the product has been divided into different components and they are charging for them individually. I understand why they did it, but don't like the model. 

Our situation is somewhat peculiar because when we bought into it, we owned everything. Later on down the road, they split the licensing model, so you had to pay extra for the LTR and extra for the multi-site replication. However, since we were using LTR prior to that license model change, they have allowed us to retain the LTR functionality at our existing licensing level, but not have the multi-site replication.

We have not evaluated other options in quite a long time. We very briefly evaluated Rubrik. 

When we first decided to implement Zerto, it wasn't very important that it provides both backup and DR in one platform. In fact, realistically, even now, while we have it and we used it on a limited scope, I'm not sure that it's needed.

With respect to our legacy solutions, I'd say that the cost of replacing them with Zerto is net neutral in the end.

My advice to anybody who is considering Zerto is that it's an awesome product and it won't steer them wrong. That said, there are some issues such as the licensing model and the situations where VPGs falling behind suspends the replication. Overall, it is a good product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.